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HYACINTH.
Three various kinds the skilled as Hyacinth name,
Varying in color and unlike in fame:
One, like pomegranate, flowers a fiery blaze,
And one the yellow citron's hue displays;
One charms with paley blue the gazer's eye,
Like the mild tint that decks the northern sky :
A strengthening mind the several kinds convey,
And grief and vain suspicion drive away.
If I could earlier have come across these lines of Marbodus, it
would have saved me a long confusion. They
embrace a fact of the
first importance : namely, that hyacinthus during Roman times covered
the whole family of corundum; rubinus hyacinthus, red hyacinth,
or ruby; sapphirus hyacinthus, blue hyacinth or sapphire;
and a yellow variety, citrinus hyacinthus. As the art of gem engraving
declined, the ruby and sapphire became known by their adjectival
terms, while hyacinthus, loosely applied to all the yellow stones
then in existence, wandered on. To run this down it was necessary
to fly from a casual reference to cyclopedia, to history, to mythology,
to poetry with a final corroborative appeal to Tiffany !
How hyacinthus could mean both blue and yellow, suddenly
became crystal clear. Also how the zircon, Theophrastus' lyncurium,
or ligurian, the ligure of the High Priest's Breastplate, disappeared
from among gems. That so wonderful a stone, indubitably Oriental,
could have hidden itself completely was a mystery. Or that, ex-
clusively from Ceylon, whence gems have come as long as gems
have been known, it should not have been discovered till 1789.
An interesting side issue of the flower which sprung
from the
youth Hyacinth's blood, as told in the chapter on Sapphire, concerned
the word Tyrian. Evidently, like myself, more than one
searcher for light judged the color of the blossom, born in blood,
to be of a similar hue. But blood drying where it falls is not the
crimson of the fresh arterial flow ; it is brown tinged with red in-
deed much like the gem hyacinth to-day. The reference to Tyrian
dye as the hue of the flower upset all calculations till I discovered
that Sir Humphrey Davy, examining a substance in the Baths of
Titus, which in its interior had a lustre approaching carmine, considered
it a specimen of the best Tyrian purple !
Thus, "her hair in hyacinthine flow/' otherwise auburn, became
probable, and we all were happy, especially those who believed
the flower was the tiger-lily, surely the same general color as the
gem. The believers in the fleur-de-lys, as it turned out, were to have
their innings later, through "the purple sheen of the raven's wing."
In the end we all found ourselves right in one way or another. With
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